'Shame' review: The joylessness of sex

(FOX SEARCHLIGHT)Michael Fassbender is a New York playboy who hides a secret "Shame."

“Shame,” the new film from British director Steve McQueen, is a story about sexual addiction, a premise that – when it screened first at Toronto’s film festival, then at New York’s – had people lining up first thing in the morning, eager for a bit of fun.

People, that is, who had absolutely no concept of addiction.

Because addiction is not about joy. Addiction is about taking a thing that you once enjoyed and abusing and misusing it until there’s no longer any pleasure to it at all. Just, briefly, the cessation of pain.

That’s the story of Brandon, the fatally handsome antihero of “Shame.” A modern satyr, he’s constantly on the prowl for sex – picking up women in the subway, ordering up escorts at his porn-crammed apartment, slipping off to hotels with willing co-workers.

Yet not only is Brandon’s compulsion joyless it is – in Michael Fassbender’s intensely angry performance – actually painful. As the title itself suggests, his behavior isn’t really about sex, but suffering (the expression on his face at times is more agonized than orgasmic).

Who is Brandon? We get hints. He’s an Irish-American from New Jersey with a flighty, depressive kid sister; he has a vague corporate job, a stark one-bedroom apartment and a great look. (He’s like Bret Easton Ellis’ “American Psycho,” minus the grand-guignol lunacy.)

But it gradually becomes clear that not only is Brandon addicted to sex, but he’s addicted to it because he thinks it’s dirty. He’s actually unable to perform with anybody he remotely cares about; sex is something for animals, and so he wallows it in because he thinks he’s a beast.

This is deeply fascinating, disturbing material, but you would expect no less from McQueen, whose last film – the even more spare “Hunger,” about the Bobby Sands hunger strike – was so willing to embrace big ideas that it let two characters sit at a table and just talk for a single, stunningly long 17-minute take.

“Shame” doesn’t do anything so stylistically daring, but it shows the same dedication to composition that McQueen (who began his career in the visual arts) showed then. Shots are held long enough to force us to really see everything in the frame (and then see it anew). Cuts are minimal, to avoid any distractions.

Of course, it’s hard to look anywhere but at Fassbender. He’s not always been well-used by other directors, but McQueen (who also directed him in “Hunger”) both brings out the man’s pain and ruthlessly tamps it down; the film’s strongest scene consists only of a single tear slowly welling up in the actor’s left eye.

And Fassbender and the film get a jolt of nervous energy from Carey Mulligan as the damaged sister. If Brandon seems determined to feel nothing, perhaps that’s because his sister, Sissy, feels so much; in one striking contrapuntal scene, he watches a porn video full of faked cries of passion while trying to ignore his sister’s true, broken-hearted emotions spilling out next door.

Stunningly graphic, “Shame” is not for everyone -- yet for an NC-17 film, it’s about as far from erotica as you could get. Pornography is all about creating a fantasy of perfection and control; “Shame” is all about weakness and compulsion. It’s not about the joy of sex. It’s about the utter despair it can’t conceal.